Aphrodite’s Triumph: The Suppliants
Aeschylus Leads Us On A Long Road, But Love Is Its Destination
Some Greek myths are well-known today. The story of the Danaids isn’t one of them. At a cocktail party you might expect someone to understand what you mean by an Oedipus complex or the Trojan Horse or a Herculean task. But “the hubris of the sons of Aegyptos” will get you a blank stare. You might have heard the tale’s denouement — the Danaids are condemned in Hades to fill a leaking tub with water — but might not have remembered what the Danaids did (they were fifty sisters who massacred forty-nine of their fifty husbands on their wedding night) or why (they were forced to marry against their and their father’s wishes). But the story was important in antiquity, particularly to the Augustans. When Augustus built his temple of Apollo Palatinus to celebrate the Battle of Actium, he decorated its portico with bronze statues of the Danaids, some of which you can see in the Palatine Museum today. Horace wrote an ode (3.11) about the Danaids, as did Ovid an elegy (Heroides 14); Propertius writes about the opening of the portico (“inter quas Danai femina turba senis,” 2.31) and Ovid (of course) tries to pick up a woman there (Amores 2.2). Aeneas kills Turnus at the end of the Aeneid when he sees Pallas’s belt on his shoulder. And what’s on Pallas’s belt? The Danaids murdering the sons of Aegyptos (10.495–505).
Why did the myth mean so much to them? This is a good topic of inquiry all by itself, but a good place to begin is Aeschylus’s most obscure play, the Ἱκέτιδες, Hiketides, or Suppliants. It tells the story of the Danaids before that fateful wedding night, when they sought asylum abroad to escape their marriages.
We have one complete tragic trilogy from antiquity: Aeschylus’s Oresteia. In its ambition and execution it remains one of the most remarkable works of art ever completed. And we know a fair amount about another trilogy, namely the trilogy of which the Suppliants forms the opening act. One of the finest indicators of Aeschylus’s ambitions as an artist is a fragment from the final play, the Danaids. Aphrodite herself takes the stage to sing the praises of love, marriage, and generation:
ἐρᾷ μὲν ἁγνὸς οὐρανὸς τρῶσαι χθόνα,
ἔρως δὲ γαῖαν λαμβάνει γάμου τυχεῖν:
ὄμβρος δ᾽ ἀπ᾽ εὐνάεντος οὐρανοῦ πεσὼν
ἔκυσε γαῖαν: ἣ δὲ τίκτεται βροτοῖς
μήλων τε βοσκὰς καὶ βίον Δημήτριον:
δένδρων τις ὥρα δ᾽ ἐκ νοτίζοντος γάμου
τέλειος ἐστί. τῶν δ᾽ ἐγὼ παραίτιος.The holy heaven desires to wound the earth,
and desire [eros] seizes the earth to join in marriage;
the rain, descending from bedded heaven,
impregnates the earth, and it brings forth for mortals
Demeter-life [bion Demetrion] and the fodder of animals;
the woods’ blossoming is of this damp marriage
the fruit. Of all these things I am the cause.
How do we go from a wedding-night massacre to Aphrodite singing a dance number about the birds and the bees? How does Aeschylus even try to hold such a spectacle together? Let’s take a look.
There are no artful teasers as the Suppliants opens; no prologue on the battlements with the guards calling out “Who’s there?” or plague-stricken citizens begging at Oedipus’s doors. The first speakers are the suppliants themselves — the immigrant asylum-seekers — and they lay out their case for asylum as soon as the speaking begins:
Ζεὺς μὲν ἀφίκτωρ ἐπίδοι προφρόνως
στόλον ἡμέτερον νάιον ἀρθέντ᾽
ἀπὸ προστομίων λεπτοψαμάθων
Νείλου. Δίαν δὲ λιποῦσαι
χθόνα σύγχορτον Συρίᾳ φεύγομεν,
οὔτιν᾽ ἐφ᾽ αἵματι δημηλασίαν
ψήφῳ πόλεως γνωσθεῖσαν,
ἀλλ᾽ αὐτογενεῖ φυξανορίᾳ
γάμον Αἰγύπτου παίδων ἀσεβῆ
ξονοταζόμεναι.May Zeus, the forethinking, the guardian, look upon our ship’s company, come from the fine-sanded mouths of the Nile. For we have fled that shining land whose pastures lie next to Syria’s, not outlawed by our people for a bloody act, not condemned by vote of the city, but fugitives due to our own fleeing of men, since we abhor the ungodly marriage of the sons of Aegyptus.
This is as succinct a beginning as could be imagined. But the tragedian is not suppressing a teaser in order to increase the dramatic tempo. After introducing their case, the chorus of suppliant women launch into what becomes a rambling, gorgeous, meditative 180-line pagan prayer, simultaneously a call for the retributive justice that is the very motive-force of tragedy (ἰδέσθω δ᾽ εἰς ὕβριν βρότειον, “let Zeus look to mortal hubris” (105)) and a doubt that it will arrive in any intelligible form:
Διὸς ἵμερος οὐκ εὐθήρατος ἐτύχθη.
παντᾷ τοι φλεγέθει
κἀν σκότῳ μελαίνᾳ ξὺν τύχᾳ
μερόπεσσι λαοῖς.The desire of Zeus has been made not easy to trace; everywhere it gleams, even in the shadow, with happenings obscure to speaking men (90).
This is one of the primary tonalities of all of Aeschylus’s work. There is a powerful faith that there is a cosmic order; but also a sense that it is enigmatic, inscrutable, and harsh, too awful for human powers to fathom. Its orderliness embraces things like wedding-night massacres and eternal punishments in Hades. These are signs of the system working. And as a kind of symbol of this hard faith we have the famous Aeschylean language, which is similarly grand to the point of obscurity. For readers today the vocabulary is utterly opaque. I read with the help of the (excellent) Alpheios online texts, but the lexicon attached to their word-study tool does not recognize words like δημηλασίαν or φυξανορίᾳ or the hapax [ε]ξονοταζόμεναι (and that’s just from the short excerpts above — imagine how the unrecognizable words heap up over a whole play!). An older unabridged-but-not-as-complete-as-later-editions Liddell and Scott I consulted does not have them either. These are obscure words. Even in Aeschylus’s day he was a linguistic brontosaur. Part of the plot of Aristophanes’s Frogs, written a generation after Aeschylus’s passing, is that now that the old master is gone no one can really write tragedy; and when he speaks in the play no one can understand what he says.
That said, the Suppliants tends to be elevated without bombast, an achievement typically cited as the reason for this play’s preservation: the poetry is unusually beautiful and fine. Aeschylus really is the Greek Shakespeare: people for centuries have found that the excellence of his thought and language redeem the difficulty inherent in trying to read him.
For this reason it is important to try to read his work in the original, particularly for a play like the Suppliants, whose strength is not in its plotting. Translators are functionally obliged to simplify — no other technique really works — but to simplify Aeschylus is to take away an important part of his meaning and message.
But there is still plenty of meaning and message in the architecture of the trilogy, which can be appreciated in the narrative arc from the Suppliants into the lost Egyptians and Danaids. The suppliant women arrive in Argos at the beginning of the Suppliants and (together with their father Danaos) meet with the king, Pelasgos. If they are not granted protection they vow to commit suicide on a set of altars. The king of Argos, Pelasgos, realizing that the Egyptians are likely to come in force to bring these women back, knows he has no easy options:
ἄτης δ᾽ ἄβυσσον πέλαγος οὐ μάλ᾽ εὔπορον
τόδ᾽ ἐσβέβηκα, κοὐδαμοῦ λιμὴν κακῶν.
εἰ μὲν γὰρ ὑμῖν μὴ τόδ᾽ ἐκπράξω χρέος,
μίασμ᾽ ἔλεξας οὐχ ὑπερτοξεύσιμον.
εἰ δ᾽ αὖθ᾽ ὁμαίμοις παισὶν Αἰγύπτου σέθεν
σταθεὶς πρὸ τειχέων διὰ μάχης ἥξω τέλους,
πῶς οὐχὶ τἀνάλωμα γίγνεται πικρόν,
ἄνδρας γυναικῶν οὕνεχ᾽ αἱμάξαι πέδον;It is an abyssal sea of ruin I have set out on, not easy to sail, and nowhere a haven from troubles; for if I do not do what I ought for you, it would be an abomination not to be outdone. But if I go to war with your kin the sons of Aegyptos before my walls how will the cost not be terrible, men bloodying the ground for the sake of women? (470–77)
The last line is also indicative of Aeschylus’s work. He often pits male against female, and weighs them against each other; and his characters consistently claim that men are better and more important. That many men will die is bad enough for King Pelasgos, but that they have to die to protect women in his opinion makes it worse. Whether to interpret this as merely Aeschylus drawing his characters — for as a playwright he never speaks in propria persona — or a larger problem of Democratic Athens, ancient Greece, history in general, or something specific to the author depends a great deal on the conclusions one wishes to draw. All can be justly blamed. It is worth noting that this kind of sexism appears more in Aeschylus than in other ancient writers, though one can note in his defense that he gives voice to a remarkable roster of female characters in his plays. In the Suppliants the stage is never without the eloquent, sympathetic chorus of female suppliants.
Pelasgos insists that the question of the suppliants be brought before a democratic assembly of the citizens, an interesting nod to democratic ideals. The citizens vote to provide asylum to the Danaids and protect them with their lives. Their father brings the news, that the council has voted
ἡμᾶς μετοικεῖν τῆσδε γῆς ἐλευθέρους
κἀρρυσιάστους ξύν τ᾽ ἀσυλίᾳ βροτῶν:
καὶ μήτ᾽ ἐνοίκων μήτ᾽ ἐπηλύδων τινὰ
ἄγειν : ἐὰν δὲ προστιθῇ τὸ καρτερόν,
τὸν μὴ βοηθήσαντα τῶνδε γαμόρων
ἄτιμον εἶναι ξὺν φυγῇ δημηλάτῳ.That we become free settlers of this land, not liable to seizure, with the inviolability of human beings; and that neither native nor foreigner may take us captive; but if violence be offered us, any landholder not coming to our aid shall be disgraced and suffer public banishment. (609–614)
Sure enough, the Egyptians do arrive, and attempt to drag the Danaids off, but they are stopped by the military threats of Pelasgos. War is promised, but it will have to wait until the sequel, for there the play ends.
We know in the second play that the Danaids get married to the sons of Aegyptos, and it is believed the plot must have operated like this: the Egyptians arrive and kill the men of Argos, taking the Danaids as brides. Danaos plots with his daughters: they will play along with the weddings, but kill the grooms on the wedding-night. This catastrophe probably closed the second play.
Structurally, this all resembles the Oresteia (and the first Star Wars trilogy, for that matter): the end of the second act brings general disaster and uncertainty. But there is a small kernel of hope: one of the daughters, Hypermnestra, did not kill her husband, Lynceus. She had fallen in love with him. In the third installment, she is brought to trial by her father for failing to execute the murderous oath she had taken with her sisters. Apparently she pleads love as her excuse for betraying her oath, Aphrodite herself argues in her defense, and Hypermnestra is acquitted. She and Lynceus go on to become the rulers of Argos and founders of its political dynasty. According to Pindar, the other Danaids were eventually married as well, which may have served as part of Aeschylus’s ultimate settlement.
The settlements in these trilogies are worth discussing. They are not really restorative: Orestes’s acquittal does not undo the horrible deaths of his mother and father. But it does provide a pattern for future success. In the Oresteia, a trial by jury is set up to replace a system of blood vengeance. In the Suppliants trilogy, there is no washing the blood of the forty-nine corpses off the stage, but mutual desire replaces forced abduction as the fundamental motive force of marriage. Consistently his works show motion from primitive violence to order and
Classical scholar Froma Zeitlin, noting the combination of Aeschylus’s cosmic vision and frequent female/male dynamic, interprets his characters at least partially as gender archetypes: “The representatives of each sex seem to embody an extreme, and hence unacceptable, version of masculine or feminine behavior.” Whether one wants to put a gender label on it — and I think that Aeschylus himself did — the tragic pattern of excess and punishment certainly applies. The sons of Aegyptos want to carry off their brides by force and they nearly all die of the consequences. The daughters of Danaos embrace an open misandry and almost all become murderers.
But do not the Danaids do right by refusing a marriage they do not want? Seemingly in order to forestall this criticism, Aeschylus casts significant doubt that this is what they are doing. Throughout the play they seem to have a leader, their father, Danaos, who it is presumed is the final architect of the murder. He constantly exhorts them to be his followers. They appear to be going astray by remaining subordinate to their father, instead of stepping out from underneath the shadow of their parents and taking their own place in the world. But it is worth saying that I see little evidence that Aeschylus prized self-realization — if understood as an isolating force — as his highest goal. For him individual subordination to larger structures such as marriage and city and the gods are the human condition. As Zeitlin continues, “The the opposition between male and female, so constantly and starkly established, should not obscure the fact that for both genders, entry into adulthood requires the abandoning of dreams of autonomy-inviolability, and avoidance of intimate relations with others.” The desire that Aphrodite sings of, if honestly pursued, leads to an experience of another human being, a move away from personal insularity and towards compromise.
To see such a sweep of narrative in a day’s sitting, as they did at the old Dionysian festivals: to watch rape and flight, marriage and murder, father-attachment and father-betrayal, virginity and desire, the war of the sexes and the joy they take in each other, and to come to see Aphrodite on the stage at the end, promising love and children to Lynceus and Hypermnestra, and a chance for the same for the other Danaids, might be one of the most effective ways to imagine what Aristotle was talking about when he spoke of catharsis as the purpose of tragedy. Thomas Hardy wrote: “If a way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.” The Divine Comedy’s first stop on the way to heaven is Hell. In some ways, there is no better prologue to Aphrodite singing about the birds and bees than a fifty-times-exaggerated mythic marriage gone wrong; it makes the real thing, and the effort to nourish it in this world, feel all the more precious.
[This is the first of a series of articles this fall and winter about Aeschylus. For an introduction to the project, visit the link here.]
John Byron Kuhner is former president of the North American Institute of Living Latin Studies (SALVI) and editor of In Medias Res.
